SSAS Versioning Without Source Control

Question

What is the best way to manage and combine different versions of SSAS solutions, without using version control?

Currently, we have a network drive where the "master" copy is stored. So individual develoeprs work with a local copy, but we recently ran into a problem with adding changes to the "master" copy.

Any suggestions? Microsoft appears to have souce control for SSIS. SSRS is easy enough to migrate by just copy/pasting the rdl files. There seems to be no easy way to accomplish this with SSAS packages.

Answer 1

What version are you talking about? I just recently added an entire SSAS project into source control. There was no issue at all.

We must somehow be talking about two different things.

Answer 2

You could try creating a single master xmla script that holds the entire cube definition. this script would live on the network drive.

The XMLA Script can be generated using the analysis service deployment tool. Then you would have to rely on a diff tool to try and manually merge the changes from each developer into the master file.This would be extremely cumbersome and error prone.

I would recommend just storing the project in source control. As previously mentioned MSAS will work with any version control provider. since it source files are just xml. For best results use a source control provider that integrates with visual studio.